If you’ve been keeping abreast of the latest electronic spying scandals, you’ll know that the phone calls of Americans are routinely harvested by shadowy “counterterrorism” authorities, and that the big e-net in the cloud is trawling farther and farther through everyone’s lives by the month, week or day.

Spying on this vast a scale has left many with fingers trembling over their devices –- could that blearily-typed “dude, last night was a killer,” end up in a takedown? Could an innocent “let's blow this town” mean face time with the Faceless Forces?

Such things have happened. So it’s all very creepy. And scary. Or, as Al Gore says, “obscenely outrageous.”

But it’s also disappointing.

For centuries the roughish trade of spying used to be a two-way street, which at least gave the spyee the fun of a frisson of fear. But these massive intersections of cables, signals, switchers, leading to silent rooms of machines that sort and re-route streams of data are simply dismal.

Trust me.

While working on a book on the U.S. nuclear program in the late 1980s, I received my mail in blatantly ripped envelopes. The flat of the photographer I worked with was invaded and her files raided in her absence. A watchful neighbour said it was “a well-dressed guy who drove away in a BMW.” Two strikes against a break-in by someone from our ‘hood in suburban Utah.

In Moscow in the 1990s, spies who never came in from the Cold War habitually listened in on phone conversations of foreign journos, allowing us the amusement of spinning stranger-than-fiction stories and the cachet of saying, “if my voice fades suddenly it’s okay, it’s just my tapper.”

When I refused an “invitation” to turn over a tape to a state prosecutor, I came home to find my music tapes scattered on my apartment floor. And at 1 a.m. in a snowstorm I was trailed through Moscow by an unmarked car: it was the only other car on the road.

Fast forward to Saddam Hussein’s Baghdad in the early 2000s, where spying was a favoured spectator sport.

Every foreigner’s phone was tapped and every hotel room bugged, to the chagrin of a friend who rashly spent the night with a colleague. Next morning an official summoned her to the appropriately-named Information Ministry: “I regret to tell you,” he said with an avuncular smile, “but it’s for your own good. That man is married.”

Sadly, things have moved on since then. The new Big Data dippers aren’t interested in sorting out our love lives or playing head games head-to-head. They can’t, because they’re machines.

“Nobody is listening to your phone calls,” said President Barack Obama, in response to the wave of media protest.

Nobody!

You betcha.

Olivia Ward has covered conflicts, politics and human rights from the former Soviet Union to the U.S., South Asia and the Middle East. And she doesn’t care who knows it.

06/06/2013

Russian President Vladimir Putin with Russian gymnast Alina Kabayeva at meeting with the Russian Olympic team in Moscow, Nov. 2004. Putin and his wife said Thursday that they had separated and their marriage was over. Reuters/ITAR-TASS/Presidential Press Service

PERSONAL

Single white Russian male, 60 -- but check out the topless photos.Looks: think Daniel Craig. Likes: tiger-wrestling, treasure-diving, flying with cranes.Traits: firm disciplinarianMoney: how much do you want?

News that Russian President Vladimir Putin and wife of 30 years, Lyudmila, are getting an amicable divorce may set hearts aflutter from Moscow to Moose Jaw. After all, the taut-torsoed former KGB officer was voted Russia’s sexiest man a mere five years ago, especially by young party supporters.

But step away from that ad.

For years, persistent rumors have matched him up with 30-year-old “rhythmic gymnast” Alina Kabayeva, whose pneumatic image has burst from many Russian websites alongside salacious speculation.

Thursday’s separation announcement, on a Russian TV channel, was brief but vague, with Lyudmila calling it a “civilized divorce,” because "we barely see each other," and Putin adding that it was a “mutual decision.” But it was not clear whether the divorce had already taken place.

Few Kremlin-watchers will be surprised.

For the past five years sightings of the couple have been few and far between, and their obligatory appearances together strained. In a rare at-home interview in 2010, they described themselves self-evidently as “married,” while the president cuddled only with his dog.

The Russian rumour mill had it otherwise. As early as 2008, a report that the couple was already divorced, and Putin planning to wed Kabayeva, led to a brusque denial and the closure of the Moscow newspaper Moskovsky Korrespondent.

But gossip persisted, including unconfirmed rumors that he had fathered two children with Kabayeva, the latest last November. She has said that a three-year-old boy with whom she was linked is her “nephew.” Putin has two grown-up daughters with Lyudmila.

Will the alleged relationship come out from the cold?

Until the mid 1980s Soviet leaders' wives were mostly seen at their funerals, and Mikhail Gorbachev’s public appearances with glamorous wife Raisa raised eyebrows and hackles. Putin has kept to the old ways of secrecy, down to Thursday's tight-lipped announcement.

Whether the ebullient Kabayeva will be as obliging as the discreet Lyudmila Putina is yet to be seen, if indeed the long standing rumours are true.

Kabayeva has posed for magazines semi-nude and wrapped in a fur rug and appeared in “provocative” YouTube videos of her gymnastic routine – proving that she, at least, has nothing to hide.

Olivia Ward covered Russia and the former Soviet Union for the Star from 1992 until 2002.

06/01/2013

Are you planning a trip to the Antarctic any time soon? A sojourn in the jungles of Papua New Guinea? A ramble through the isolated northern Amazon?

If not, set aside a couple of hours for the Royal Ontario Museum’s journey to the ends of the Earth through the lens of Brazilian uber-photog Sebastiao Salgado.

Salgado, 69, began his career as an economist, but abandoned the ivory tower for the grassroots, trekking with his camera kit to meet the people who are on the sharp end of economic policy – the forgotten, the desperately poor, the displaced.

The ROM exhibition, Genesis, is a new chapter for Salgado. Instead of chronicling hell on Earth, he spent eight years recording his view of an earthly paradise for posterity: his “love letter to the planet.”

It was a painful transition. His decades of capturing human misery had left him depressed and exhausted, ready to shelve his cameras. And returning to southeast Brazil in the 1990s he was shocked to see that not only people, but land was in crisis – the lush landscape he remembered withered and dying from unsustainable farming.

He and his wife and collaborator, Lelia Wanick Salgado, created Instituto Terra, a non-profit group that replanted nearly 2 million trees, bringing it back to vibrant life. The result led to project Genesis.

It was a gruelling but rewarding eight-year trek through the pristine beauty of remote places, both inhabited and free from human footprints.

His stark, multi-dimensional black and white photos are almost sculptural in quality. The viewer is drawn into them hypnotically. Missing are the unseen human forces that are destroying the territory they depict: pollution, globalization, overpopulation, climate change.

“I want people to understand that this is the only world we have,” Salgado told CBC. “I believe…we’ve arrived at the break-even point. From here we cannot cross. We’ve already destroyed too much.”

05/27/2013

Children play in an orphanage in the southern Russian city of Rostov-on-Don. A law barring Americans from adopting Russian children may prevent thousands from leaving institutions where they will spend their early lives. (Reuters/Vladimir Konstantinov)

In the mid 1990s, a journalist friend was smacked in the face by one of those moral choices that jumps out at you in war zones and countries in chaos.

While she was shooting a TV doc on homeless people living in Moscow train stations, a tiny, dirt-encrusted child caught her eye, smiled winsomely, and clung to her with determination. The little girl’s mother, who appeared drugged, had drifted away after a brief interview. By nightfall the hectic shoot ended, the toddler was still there but the mother had disappeared. A frantic search yielded nothing.

My friend, an overworked single reporter who travelled constantly, swallowed hard. She took the child back to her apartment, washed and fed her. Next day she took her to a doctor, who treated her skin ailments and pronounced her basically healthy. Shortly, the reporter found a reputable Canadian adoption agency that could give the tot a new start in life.

But first the child had to be legally enrolled in a Russian orphanage. The reporter did so reluctantly, relieved that an eager Canadian couple was already waiting in the wings, and her stay there would be short. But it didn’t work out that way. After negotiating a $15,000 “adoption fee,” the Canadians heard nothing more. Then the trail went cold. Eventually, the reporter learned, the child was adopted by an American couple -- apparently because they had anted up a larger sum.

Still, it was an unusually happy ending for one of Russia’s thousands of abandoned children. According to the American-based child advocacy group MiraMed, hundreds of young girls have disappeared from orphanages into prostitution, some of the older ones lured with promises of jobs. Many of them are reportedly trafficked abroad.

The fate of more than 100,000 others – some experts say 300,000 -- who remain in Russia’s state orphanages is often sad. Most are not the children of dead parents, but abandoned because they are labelled “defective.” Those with serious disabilities are at highest risk.

Nor are many Russians eager to adopt even healthy children. Since Soviet times, when abandoned children were considered to be from “degenerate” families of drug or alcohol addicts, adoption has carried a stigma of its own. When homelessness spread after the fall of communism, children were left on the street by destitute, often addicted parents.

The fate of some who end up in state homes is dire. Last week a chilling video went viral, showing beatings and abuse of seven children at an orphanage in eastern Siberia. The abusers were former orphans, who admitted they were only doing what had been done to them. A criminal investigation of the alleged perpetrators is unlikely to change the system.

Ironically, experts say, the oil wealth that has allowed Russia’s subsidies for orphanages to rise dramatically, has harmed more than helped in some cases. If the children are shut away with little contact with the outside world, the institutions are ripe for corruption and abuse. Their funding depends on numbers -- making it lucrative to discourage fostering.

So it’s all the more galling for child advocates who say that Russia has targeted orphans in what appears to be revenge for Washington’s Magnitsky Act. The U.S. law puts financial and visa restrictions on those suspected of involvement in the death of a Russian tax lawyer who blew the whistle on an alleged tax fraud that reached into Russia’s circles of power.

Though Moscow denies any link, it swiftly passed its own law banning adoptions by Americans on grounds of alleged abuse of adoptees in the U.S. Other countries that are considering Magnitsky sanctions worry that they might also end up on a “no adoptions” list.

In spite of the difficulties, a number of Russian charities are struggling to improve the lives of orphans, and some have tried to run their own unofficial group homes. But they get little help or attention. Still less do the orphanage children whose voices are seldom heard.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002. She has written on conflicts, politics and human rights from Russia to the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

05/23/2013

Elizabeth Hurley attends a news conference in Chechnya's capital Grozny, earlier this week. Hurley will star alongside with French actor Gerard Depardieu in the drama, titled "Turquoise, " that will be directed by French filmmaker Philippe Martinez. (AP Photo/Musa Sadulayev)

The modern history of Chechnya? No, a media description of the French-Russian thriller, Turquoise, starring curvaceous British actress Elizabeth Hurley, and lumpy formerly-French actor Gerard Depardieu, now on a permanent tax holiday from Paris in his adopted homeland, Russia.

The film’s biggest casting coup is Chechnya itself.

Russia’s southern banana republic is soon to be a glitzy backdrop to a thriller that aims to eradicate those grittier Hiroshima-like bombing images, massacres, firefights and filtration camps that did so much to undermine its star quality during two brutal wars. Not to mention more recent attention as the place of origin of the alleged Boston Marathon bombers.

“I followed everything that happened here and saw a city totally rebuilt and very sympathetic people,” Depardieu told reporters from the Chechen capital Grozny, where he is a “very close friend” of warlord leader Ramzan Kadyrov. He is also making a Russian-produced film on Chechnya's post war reconstruction.

Kadyrov’s own hard man image got the soft-lens treatment when Hurley was photographed next to him, cuddling his white kitten, nostalgically named Chanel. And he has taken to posting “almost adorably kooky” pix on Instagram, recently posing benignly alongside another apparent close friend, martial arts film actor Steven Seagal, who gave an impromptu folk dance performance in Grozny.

He’s imported top-flight footballers for exhibition matchers. And most notoriously, invited action star Jean-Claude Van Damme and Oscar-winning actor Hilary Swank for lavish national celebrations in Grozny two years ago that coincided with his birthday. (Kadyrov formally opposes public birthdays to avoid accusations of a Stalin-like cult of personality.) After viral, and virulent, media reports, Swank apologized, insisted she knew nothing of her host’s allegedly dubious human rights record, and reportedly fired her manager on return.

This time, Hurley and Depardieu are making no excuses. If they had earlier doubts they could have consulted any number of human rights groups -- like Memorial, whose Chechnya monitor, Natalya Estemirova, was kidnapped and murdered in 2009. Kadyrov’s regime has been accused of pursuing its enemies to foreign countries, killing six of them in Turkey alone. Allegations of human rights abuses fill the files of advocates who can only do their dangerous work outside of Chechnya.

Depardieu, at least, won’t be apologizing any time soon. His new BFF, President Vladimir Putin, personally handed him a Russian passport after he quit France in a dudgeon over a 75 per cent tax on millionaires. He now has registration papers for a new flat in the Soviet-style city of Saransk, capital of the Russian republic of Mordovia, where he plans to open a restaurant.

The region, he rhapsodized, has no oil or gas, but “rich people who make their wishes come true in life.” Except for Pussy Riot member Nadezhda Tolokonnikova, who was denied parole last month from a Mordovian penal colony where she’s serving a two-year sentence for a brief protest in a Moscow cathedral. None of the punk group has been invited to perform in Grozny.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002, including Russia’s two wars with Chechnya. She collaborated on Shelley Saywell’s film A Child’s Century of War, which was based on her reports, and listed for an Academy Award.

The Russians are refusing to buckle under American pressure to stop supporting Syrian president Bashar Assad. The Americans want him gone but the Russians insist Assad's departure cannot be a precondition to peace talks with rebels. The disagreement is a major reason why the 2012 Geneva Communique, which sets out a peace plan, and which you can read here has gone nowhere.

But how much influence do the Russians and Americans have on what happens on the ground anyway?

I spoke to Professor Joshua Landis at Oklahoma University who blogs at Syria Comment and is one of the foremost experts on the country. His sober assessment in short: whatever the Russians and Americans agree to will not matter very much on Syria's streets, fields, and cities where the Syrians are killing each other with abandon.

He told me: "The main problem is the Russians don’t control Syria and neither do the Americans. There are over 1,000 rebel armies none of which take orders from any supreme commander and if Russia told them to stop they wouldn’t stop. If America tells them to stop they wouldn’t stop. I suppose America could have more influence with Assad but if Assad said 'I want to compromise with the rebels' he wouldn’t get an answer. If he got an answer from one or two rebel armies he wouldn’t get them from the other 1,000."

The most lethal, and hence, powerful, rebel armies want Assad dead and they won't settle for anything less, he said. What this means for the unfortunate people of Syria is the killings will continue.

Landis said: "The problem is there is no party that is responsible for the citizens of Syria. And so you can kill the citizens of Syria and everyone can wring their hands but no one can stop them. And a rebel commander who commands 5,000 or 10,00 rebels is not responsible for the deaths of all the Syrians so he has no obligation to come to the table and sue for peace.”

Hamida Ghafour is a foreign affairs reporter at the Star. She has lived and worked in the Middle East and Asia for more than 10 years and is the author of a book on Afghanistan. Follow her on Twitter @HamidaGhafour

05/02/2013

Russian President Vladimir Putin hands out the first "Hero of Labour" awards to Russians since reviving the Soviet-era tradition this year. (AFP photo/ RIA-Novosti/Alexei Nikolsky/Getty Images)

Call it nostalgia, neo-nationalism or just plain politics. Russia is going back to the future again, with a revival of Soviet medals.

Back in the day – Stalin’s – 15 minutes of fame meant being decorated for invaluable services to the motherland. It was far, far better than the reverse, which was an unpaid holiday in a camp in Siberia.

Medals were taken seriously in the early Soviet years and with increasing skepticism over the years. When communism collapsed, some medal-holders headed for market stalls to eke out a few dollars from souvenir-hunting western tourists.

But President Vladimir Putin decided to change those casual attitudes.

In a 2007 crackdown on medal-buying, a Chilean graduate student visiting from Missouri was under house arrest for three months after unwittingly purchasing one “illegally” while in the impoverished southern city of Voronezh.

Now Soviet-era medals have been restored and updated.

One of the most prominent Soviet honours for women was a medal for “Hero Mother,” awarded (quite rightly) to those who had at least 10 children. In the new Russia the bar has been lowered to a mere four, and the medal renamed the “Order of Parental Glory.”

Putin’s supporters in the Nashi youth group, meanwhile, were encouraged to pair off at their annual summer camps, marry, and produce new Russian citizens – hopefully enrolled in Putin’s United Russia Party.

That got off to a slow start, as fertility rates are still declining and demographic disaster looms.

But more recently, Putin has started dusting off the “Hero of Labour” awards that inspired factory workers and collective farmers in decades past.

The first re-issues – tweaked to remove the Soviet hammer and sickle motif -- have gone to famed nationalist conductor Valery Gergiev (now of the London Symphonic Orchestra) and brain surgeon Alexander Konovalov, as well as a clutch of blue collar workers.

Some doubters suggest that Putin’s enthusiasm for historic honours has more to do with politics than patriotism. As protests continue, and grumbling over corruption, alleged election fraud and inequality lowers his poll ratings, he has turned his steely gaze to new -- or old -- horizons for political support.

The medals will take him only so far. According to the latest census material, Russia’s sprawling regions, once the focus of communist economic plans, are depopulating as lack of modernization, development, employment and environmental protection take their toll.

“In place of the traditional Russian village,” said commentator Vitaly Slovetsky, “we will soon have lands without any people.”

From Putin’s Russia, with or without medals, there’s no way back to the U.S.S.R.

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002 as Moscow and European bureau chief. She was never awarded a medal there.

Index of most dangerous countries for journalists. (Committee to Protect Journalists)

Nigeria is a new addition to the list of the most dangerous countries in which to be a journalist, joining mainstays such as Pakistan, Somalia and Mexico.

Five journalists in Nigeria have been murdered since 2009. None of the cases have been solved.

“Investigations into these killings are usually carried out with sloppiness, and no real culprits are caught," said Ayode Longe, a senior officer with the Media Rights Agenda, a press freedom group in Nigeria. “That has emboldened others to assault journalists, believing nothing would be done to them."

The global index is released each year by the Committee to Protect Journalists and calculates unsolved journalist murders as a percentage of each country's population.

The index also found soaring impunity rates in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil.

The CPJ said conditions for journalists are improving in Nepal and Russia, "although both nations remain dangerous for the press."

The analysis founds increasing anti-press violence in Somalia, Pakistan, and Brazil, where national leaders are unwilling or unable to address the issue. In Somalia, 23 journalist murders have gone unsolved over the past decade.

The CPJ report highlights the cased of Wali Khan Babar, a journalist with Geo TV in Pakistan who was murdered in 2011.

While several suspects connected to one of the country’s leading political parties, the Muttahida Qaumi Movement, are facing trial, the prosecution has been hindered by the murders of five people connected to the investigation, including witnesses and police officers.

In November 2012, an eyewitness was gunned down two days before he was due to give testimony, the CPJ said.

Iraq is said to be the most dangerous country in which to be a journalist. Over the past 10 years, there have been 93 unsolved killings of journalists in the country of 33 million. Somalia was ranked No. 2, followed by the Philippines, where 55 journalists have been murdered without any convictions in the country of 94 million.

Rick Westhead is a foreign
affairs writer at the Star. He was based in India as the Star’s South
Asia bureau chief from 2008 until 2011 and reports on
international aid and development. Follow him on Twitter @rwesthead

04/19/2013

Ruslan Tsarni, uncle of the suspected Boston Marathon bombing suspects, in front of his home in Montgomery Village, Maryland, asked his nephew, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, to turn himself in. (Photo by Allison Shelley/Getty Images)

The Boston marathon suspects “put shame on the entire Chechen ethnicity,” said their shocked uncle Ruslan Tsarni, as a massive manhunt for his surviving nephew continued on Friday.

It’s true that “Chechen” and “terrorist” are all too often linked in the headlines, giving the impression of a people hell bent on destruction. That may be because the vast majority of the small diaspora -- now spread over many continents after fleeing wars, repression and economic collapse -- lives quietly, blends in and attracts no media attention.

Few Canadians have met a Chechen, and those who have may not know it.

Q: Where is Chechnya?

A: It’s a tiny territory in southern Russia, flanked by the spiking Caucasus mountains. On the plains, you could drive from one side to the other in less than two hours.

Q: What’s the population?

A: About 1.2 million.

Q: Who’s in charge?

A: Officially, Russia. But it’s ruled by a regional president, Ramzan Kadyrov, backed by billions of dollars from Moscow to rebuild the decimated republic after two wars. The price: total submission to Moscow and Kadyrov. His brutal rule has sparked rebellions that have spread throughout the Caucasus.

Q: Was Chechnya always part of Russia?

A: No, but Russia saw it as a strategic gateway to the Black and Caspian seas. From the early 18th century to 1860 it fought an expansionist war against fierce resistance from Chechen warriors. It staked a claim on Chechnya and neighboring Muslim republics. But the battle was never over.

Q: And earlier?

A: Chechens lived in autonomous clans, or taips. Noone is sure where they originated and they left no written history to explain it. Some trace their ancestry back to the fair-skinned Celts, pointing to the red hair of some families as “pure Chechen.” Others believe they were linked with ancient Armenia or the Fertile Crescent.

Q: What language do they speak?

A: Chechen is part of the Vainakh group of Caucasian languages. Chechens have used Arabic, Latin and Russian alphabets over the centuries.

Q: Are they Muslims?

A: They’re traditionally Sufis, a mystical strain of Islam. After the first Russian-Chechen war of the 1990s, Arab-backed extremists poured in money and weapons to convert them to radical Wahhabism. Kadyrov has tried to revitalize Sufism, but also imposed a stricter attitude to religion, including a ”virtue campaign” for women’s dress.

Q: Why did Chechnya fight two recent wars against Russia?

A: Chechens were subjected to massive, and murderous deportations during World War II, and even when they returned felt like second class citizens. Poverty and unemployment soared in the mountain areas.

When the Soviet Union crumbled, Nationalist Chechen leader Dzhokhar Dudayev seized the chance to declare sovereignty, flaunted his independence and Russia invaded. A Chechen guerrilla leader's incursion into neighboring Daghestan, and accusations of a terrorist bombing, sparked a second war in 1999.

Q: Are Chechens better off now?

A: Grozny looks like a glossy modern capital. But unemployment is massive and the oil industry hasn’t recovered from the wars. Russia keeps Chechnya on a tight financial leash and Kadyrov is in a power struggle with Moscow for more profits from its oil. Meanwhile ordinary Chechens battle poverty, corruption and repression.

Q: Anything else we should know?

A: Chechens have a famous code of hospitality to strangers. But if you aren’t offered a meal within 45 minutes of visiting a home, you know it’s time to leave.

Olivia Ward covered the first and second Russian-Chechen wars as the Star’s bureau chief for the former Soviet Union. She won a national newspaper award for her reporting, and a film based on it, A Child’s Century of War, was listed for an Academy Award.

04/11/2013

A U.S. soldier watches as a statue of Iraq's President Saddam Hussein falls in central Baghdad on April 9, 2003. (Reuters/Goran Tomasevi)

Ten years ago this week a group of Iraqis –- with a crane handily supplied by the U.S. marines –- lassoed a statue of Saddam Hussein in the middle of a Baghdad square and toppled it to the ground: cheers followed in Washington -- and years of tears in Iraq.

The tragi-comic back story of the battle with Saddam’s statue was told in the New Yorker by journalist Peter Maass, who watched as Iraqis chipped away with a sledgehammer at the statue’s base, a symbolic act that mirrored the Bush administration’s bungled attempt at a quick, clean break from the dictator’s brutal regime.

A series of fumbles with American and Iraqi flags ensued, until the marine cavalry saved the day. It supplied the “iconic moment” of victory the TV cameras were hungry for, in spite of protests from some journos who were eager to tell the inconvenient truth, that the war was only beginning. Those who dissented were rewritten out of “history.”

“Very few Iraqis were there,” Maass wrote. “You can also see, from photographs as well as video, that much of the crowd was made up of journalists and marines.” Nevertheless, the event neatly substituted for reality. And it was a great leap forward for the statue-toppling events that have now become de rigeur when dictators tumble.

In 2011, a sculptured golden fist that symbolized Moammar Gadhafi crushing a U.S. fighter plane was smashed by rebels, along with a life-size statue of the Libyan strongman. But fewer hacks were there to snap the moment. Statues of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak were smashed with even less fanfare when the Tahrir Square protesters won the day.

Last month an amateur video showed opposition groups celebrating the destruction of a statue of Bashar Assad’s equally ruthless father, Hafez, in a newly-taken town.

But the statue-smashing tradition goes back much farther, to the ancient world, when newer conquerors would raze and smash the symbols of older ones.

But they lacked the technology and propaganda machines of later eras. In the 19th century, German-born artist Johannes Oertel painted a heroic picture of American patriots pulling down a statue of British king George III in Manhattan in 1776 – but eyewitness accounts contradicted his portrait of cheering native people, elegantly dressed women and children looking on. Rather, they said, it was a rag-tag mob.

Fast forward to the Soviet Union in 1991, when Moscow had its own stage-managed “iconic moment” to show the world that communism had collapsed.

Nikolai Amelin, a 28-year-old street sweeper with a buff body and blond, chiseled features, was plucked from the crowd by a PR-smart aide of President Boris Yeltsin and asked to put a rope around the the massive statue of Felix Dzerzhinsky – the prime enforcer of Joseph Stalin’s terror. The crane Amelin was riding ripped the statue from its base. Overnight, he became the surprised, but triumphant, face of the New Russia.

“It was a decisive moment and it felt like a fantasy,” he told me a decade later, from his sleek central Moscow flat. Now a much-in-demand model, he commanded a wage that few Muscovites could dream of. But at the dawn of the plutocratic Putin era, his old revolutionary spirit was still simmering. He joined a protest movement against developers who were forcing the poorest market vendors from their patches of pavement.

“There are two parallel lives in Russia,” he said bitterly. “The life of the state and the life of the people. They have no meeting point.”

And Dzerzhinsky?

The 15 tonne statue that once loomed over the KGB’s sinister Lubyanka Square is resting in Moscow’s retirement home for old Soviet artifacts, outside the Central House of Artists. Last year the Moscow authorities announced it would be restored to its old glory – and awarded the title of an “object of cultural heritage.”

Olivia Ward covered the former Soviet Union from 1992-2002. She has reported on conflicts, politics and human rights there and in the Middle East and South Asia, winning national and international awards.

Legal Notice

TheStar.com
Copyright Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. All rights reserved. The views expressed are those of the writer and do not necessarily reflect the views of the Toronto Star or www.thestar.com. The Star is not responsible for the content or views expressed on external sites.
Distribution, transmission or republication of any material is strictly prohibited without the prior written permission of Toronto Star Newspapers Limited. For information please contact us using our webmaster form. www.thestar.com online since 1996.